Transylvanian Review 2/2013

Abstract – The Renaissance Woman vs. the Woman of the Middle Ages in Cervantes’sDon Quixote – The present study depicts the hypostases of the Renaissance woman in Cervantes’s antichivalrous novel Don Quixote. All these hypostases lead to a common element: the real woman, the woman who feels and lives according to her human nature, versus the imaginary woman belonging to chivalrous literature. The many feminine characters populating Cervantes’s work—Camilla, Marcela, Luscinda, Dorothea—are, unlike their literary predecessors, the Ladies of the Middle Ages, prominent expressions of free will. Even though sociologically speaking the women’s status during the Renaissance does not register mutations as compared to the previous era, the marked difference promoted by literature lies in their struggle to achieve fulfillment as human beings within life’s boundaries.

Abstract –Lady Bellaston or Third Wave Feminism in Eighteenth-Century Trenches– This paper tries to tackle the problem of Henry Fielding’s female characters by analyzing Lady Bellaston, one of the most interesting characters in Tom Jones, through a feminist grid. The second problem this paper deals with is Fielding’s own relation to feminist claims and the extent to which he presaged feminism, in general, and the feminism of his century, in particular, taking into account that Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was published almost half a century after Fielding’s death (1754).

Abstract – Transylvanian Romanian Journals and their Role in Shaping the Image of Romanian Women and Family Relations – The present paper aims at revealing the historical value of one of the mass media used by Romanian elites in their effort of redefining the roles women and family should have in the Romanian society of the 19th century. Two were in fact the main objectives we aimed at achiving: first to stress the importance that printed press has as an historical resource for the study of women and family history and, secondly to reveal how press perfectly mirrored some of the great debates of the Transylvanian society during this century. As a society has at its basis the women and the family, what we intended to point out is how the Romanian journals, such as Gazeta Transilvaniei, Familia, Amicul Familiei were used as disseminating and formative tools for educating the women or correcting some bad habits caused by the modernity in the family areal. Moreover, our intention was also of studying the journals form a gender perspective as they represent indeed a major media in which the debate over women’s condition and role in the society developed.

Abstract –Womanliness and Anonymity within the “Sburătorul” Literary Community – The present paper endeavors to raise the issue of feminine presence within a larger community of writers, having as a point of departure the particular situation represented by a Romanian literary circle that operated between the two world wars (i.e. “Sburătorul” circle, 1919–1943), and was lead by E. Lovinescu’s reputed figure. In his turn, the mentor of this group fashioned himself as the most prominent and authoritative Romanian critic who, making use of this quality, undertook the project to sketch a gallery of female portraits corresponding chiefly to “Sburătorul” women writers. What draws the attention from the first instance is the manner of portraiture with respect to feminine profiles; the critic would not count on singularity as a main trait of artistic temper, but he would rather interlace a series of variations on a privileged core theme, that is, the anonymous personality. By carrying through a detailed analysis on the various forms of indeterminacy, we try to establish that anonymity is a question connected to the general democratization of art in modern times (just anyone can become a writer), shadowed, on the other side, by the complementary notion of genius styled in a Romantic vein.

Carmen Elisabeth Puchianu, From Essential Chill to (Wesentlicher) Schauer: Poetry As Particular Act of Translation and Work in Progress• 53

Abstract – FromEssential Chillto(Wesentlicher) Schauer: Poetry As Particular Act of Translation and Work in Progress – The paper deals with the linguistic and cultural choices facing someone who was born and grew up into a multilingual and multicultural family. I have also focused on the fact that under certain cultural and political circumstances, writing in more than one language is not only possible, but even necessary. My analysis proceeds with several poems which I have written in English and German trying to establish whether such artifacts should be regarded as translations from one language into the other, or, conversely, if one’s poetry should be conceived as the outcome of a particular kind of translation. My paper is further concerned with making an autobiographical statement which I have deemed necessary for my readers to grasp the status I have legitimately earned inside the present-day German literature produced in Romania.

Coriolan Horaþiu Opreanu, The 1900th Anniversary of Trajan’s Column in Rome: The Symbolism of Trajan’s Victory in Rome and at Sarmizegetusa Regia• 65

Abstract – The 1900th Anniversary of Trajan’s Column in Rome: The Symbolism of Trajan’s Victory in Rome and at Sarmizegetusa Regia – The author briefly presents the characteristics of Trajan’s Column, inaugurated 1900 years ago, highlighting its great importance for the reconstruction of the history of Trajan’s Dacian war, as well as its ideological and propagandistic message. It is a monument to the Victory of the Emperor which links the imperial power with the army and the glory of the Empire. In the theatre of war, in the mountains at Sarmizegetusa Regia, the army expressed the same ideas, but in a totally different manner. Their monuments are the work of modest military artisans, inferior in artistic value to the monuments of Trajan’s Forum in Rome, of which only the Column is still in existence.

Ilie Pârvu, Between Logic and Science, or How Is Possible an Exact Philosophy of the Real Science? • 78

Abstract – Between Logic and Science, or How Is Possible anExactPhilosophy of theRealScience? – The purpose of this paper is to present one of the main methodological problems of the contemporary philosophy of science and to indicate a possible way towards a constructive solution. In various ways and at different levels of reflection it is stated that the most profound difficulty of today’s general philosophy of science is the tension between the propensity to use exact and formal methods in the study of science and the actual relevance of such procedures for the understanding of real science. In the spirit of one the most important programs in the exact (formal) philosophy of science, devised by P. Suppes, the paper suggests that the new concepts of the mathematical category theory can offer a constructive modality to solve this tension, by providing the necessary instruments for the effective (re)construction of science at the fundamental level and at the same time for a formal metatheoretical analysis of scientific practices. The contribution of this article consists of introducing (as a preliminary analysis for such approach), the concept of the general form of scientific theories, which will allow us to use the mathematical category theory in order to formally represent the structure of fundamental theories and to build a unified mathematical metatheory of the different contemporary forms of the theoretical construction of science. As a side-effect, this approach can contribute to the reexamination from a new perspective of the possibility that metatheoretical studies can contribute effectively to foundational research.

Abstract – Frege on Numbers – The paper discusses Frege’s concept of numbers as logical objects, focusing essentially on Frege’s Platonism. While the issue could be approached from two perspectives, ontological and epistemological, and while both of the aforementioned points are connected and it is very hard to make a sharp distinction between them, at least in Frege’s case, the present study pursues the first, ontological approach. As an explicit exposition of a Fregean ontologyis not to be found in Frege’s philosophy, the author seeks to infer his ontological commitment from other clear claims.

Abstract – Opposing Actions – Starting with a philosophical puzzle, that of a situation when a speech act and a non-communicative action contradict each other, and suggesting a way in which it could be solved, the paper looks at the manner in which our linguistic practices are intertwined with our non-communicative actions. The author proceeds on the basis of two assumptions: the only way in which we could explain language acquisition properly is to study the ways in which our uses of objects and words are related to each other, and secondly, although a logical notion such as negation—regarded as a truth function—is acquired when we operate with words alone, its uses are strongly related to other cases, like that of illocutionary negations, the case of verbal and nonverbal rejections of different kinds, that of non-communicative actions performed to avoid certain things to happen, the case of opposing actions, and perhaps other cases, some of which do not require us to use words at all.

Abstract – Is Mathematics the Theory of Instantiated Structural Universals? – The paper contends that one cannot defend realism about numbers on the basis of a metaphysical realism about instantiated structural universals, suggesting that it is misleading to take a metaphysical view as a basis for the ontology and epistemology of mathematics. The author criticizes Bigelow’s attempt to reduce number theory to a metaphysical theory about instantiated structural universals, which purports to reduce number theory to the theory of structural universals, and which flies in the face of solid mathematical knowledge. The study begins with a presentation of Armstrong’s theory of structural properties as instantiated universals and of Lewis’s devastating criticism of this theory, arguing that several responses to this criticism, by Armstrong, Bigelow, and more recently, by Joan Pagès, can hardly succeed. Finally, it contends that one possible construal of structural universals via non-well-founded sets is resisted by the realist structuralist about mathematics. The conclusion highlights an issue that would have to be addressed by anyone who wants to pursue Bigelow’s reductionist project: the alleged countability of the real numbers.

Abstract – The Archives of the Cluj Folklore Society: The Situation of Ethnological Studies in Communist Romania – The paper investigates the Archives of the Cluj Folklore Society, hosted by the Faculty of Letters of Babeş-Bolyai University between 1958 and 1993. The study focuses on the collections included in the archives and on their situation in the ideological, epistemological, and methodological context of ethnological studies in communist Romania and in the years immediately following the fall of Ceauşescu’s regime. During the three and a half decades in question, the field of folklore and then that of ethnology were constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed several times. The mutations experienced by the acfs are essentially those of Romanian ethnological studies during the communist and post-communist periods, a period little investigated so far from the vantage point of the history of this discipline and which remains, therefore, a topic that requires further explorations.